Just Like Pretending
by Hurtful Purple
Summary: Two little boys are playing together, a game sort of like cops and robbers. But with a real gun. Any two newsies can be used for this. One shot.


**Disclaimer:** I do not claim any ownership whatsoever to _Newsies_, or anything affiliated with _Newsies_.

**A/N:** I wrote this a while ago, took it down, edited it, put it back up, and edited it again, lol.

It's been years since it happened - nearly seven, if I remember correctly – yet it still haunts me. It invades my dreams as I sleep, and it pushes itself to the front of my mind while I'm awake. I can never escape.

But it's not the memory of what happened that kills me. No, it's just remembering that the little boy had only been eight-years-old, and hadn't had a chance to change the world or to make an impact on someone's life. He didn't change anything. His death did.

I killed him. I killed Jeremy Walkins. It was an accident though. An honest mistake. A mistake that I will never let myself live down.

We'd been friends. Best friends. There was this game we would always play. We never came up with a name for it, but we played it nevertheless. I guess you could say that it was kind of like Cops and Robbers. A cop chases down a criminal, corners him, and kills him. Then, you get up, switch rolls, and play all over again.

As we played, our parents watched us to make sure that we didn't get hurt. They always got a kick out of us and our little twig guns, and the ketchup packets we stole from school and used to look like blood.

But the one time that they weren't watching us, weren't peeking out at us through their off-white lacy curtains, we decided to get a little braver. We used an actual weapon.

I went to my father's garage to find one of the guns that he kept for hunting. He'd always thought that he kept it up high enough so that I wouldn't get into it. He was wrong. And I, being nine-years-old at the time, had no clue how to use it. I took the gun down from it's spot on the wall, and went out to the front yard.

I'd asked Jeremy if he knew how to use it. He said no, so I started messing around with it.

Before I knew it, I'd shot him. Even to this day, I don't know exactly what happened. I didn't even comprehend that he'd been hurt, and already, he was falling to the ground.

But that doesn't matter. All that matters is that he's dead. He's almost been dead for 8 years now. Because in a week and a few days, it'll be the anniversary of his death.

My father never got over the fact that I'd killed Jeremy with his gun. He blamed himself for it for years, because he couldn't have kept it out the reach of his nine-year-old son, and his sons eight-year-old friend.

My mother never got over the fact that her little boy had killed his best friend. She kept me locked up in my room whenever I wasn't at school, and I was grounded for a month. But I felt that Ideserved much more than a simple grounding. I felt that I deserved what Jeremy got.

It took me a while to get over the fact that I'd killed him. At first I thought he was just pretending. Simple as that. For months, I told myself that it was just like pretending. But it wasn't. It wasn't just like pretending, because this time, he wouldn't open his eyes. He wouldn't jump to his feet grinning. He was just laying there, an unopened ketchup packet clenched in his fist, and real blood seeping through some unseen wound.

The Walkins moved away a few months after it happened. They couldn't stand coming out of their house every morning to see the blood stain on their driveway. They just packed up and left, barely saying goodbye.

But before they left, they gave me Jeremy's most prized possessions, so that they had nothing to remember him by. His baseball, pictures of him and friends, and other things like that.

I went to the cemetery the other day. I found his headstone. It didn't say much on it. Just his name, birth date, death date, and below that in slightly bigger print, it said "All who knew him will miss him greatly." Somehow, that small amount of text never seemed enough for me. How can a few minor words describe the life of a human being?

The day Jeremy died taught me something I will never forget:

The human life is a precious, fragile thing, a miracle too worthy to waste.

* * *

Okay, what do you think? I edited it, obviously. There's more... I don't know, feeling, in it, I think.


End file.
